Lady Lazarus
by Mystical-Magical-Hormones
Summary: In the Flesh au (post zombie apocalypse): Sasha, a member of the partially deceased, has to flee her home in America to go live in South Germany with her cousin. However, in the small village of Trost, she meets Mikasa, another PDS sufferer, with issues of her own. The two form an unlikely friendship, which leads to something more. MikasaxSasha
1. Out of the Ash

An: This AU is inspired by BBC 3's 'In the Flesh', which is amazing. I've actually had this AU stuck in my head since season 2 of ItF came out six weeks ago but I was dead set on keeping the plot the same but the characters just didn't fit, so now it's set in the same universe as 'In the Flesh' and with elements of the season 1 plot line added in. Oh and an obvious disclaimer, I don't own anything from 'Attack on Titan'/'Shingeki no Kyojin' or 'In the Flesh'. Or 'Lady Lazarus', which is a poem by Sylvia Plath, and the chapter names will be based on lines from that poem.

* * *

Sasha had just gotten off her flight at Memmigen airport. This was luckily one of the only airports to have not been completely destroyed during the rising in 2009. The ones back home had not been so fortunate. The denser populated America, with its higher rates of gun crime, had more risers than the average civilian could handle.

There probably weren't any partially-deceased on the plane except for Sasha. She was glad to have been able to hide her neurotriptyline so well. She really thought that security would have been tighter, considering her trick for hiding her medication was the same from when she used to shop lift candy bars in the local convenience store when she was seven. However given the time, Sasha knew she had to get to a bathroom quickly in order to take her injections. Once she was out of the airport, she would be fine.

Germany, unlike America, had a large amount of openly-undead people milling around. Most of them weren't boarding planes, but a lot of them were chatting with people, or being hugged within an inch of their life, or afterlife… perhaps?

The baggage claim was taking too long. Sasha was looking at her watch, in two minutes the alarm reminding her to take her neurotriptyline would go off.

She was owner of bag 143. The bags coming past were currently in the 80's. She was waiting for sixty sets of luggage to go past.

Bag number 90 went past, Sasha checked her watch, one minute and forty five seconds to go. An old woman pulled a large brown travel suitcase off of the conveyor belt. An old silver flip phone pressed to her ear as she did this. She loudly complained about the _awful _rotters who ruined her town and how she had to live with her _awful _sister in Germany, and how _awful _everything was.

Bag number 100, Sasha checked her watch again, her foot started to tap slighty. One minute and twenty five seconds until she had to take her neurotriptyline. "Fuck," she muttered under her breath.

A business man picked up a light leather suitcase and walked away briskly. He wore fine leather shoes which tapped against the floor smoothly.

Bag number 110, one minute and ten seconds to go.

A family grabbed their respective suitcases, except the mother who was helping the little girl pull off her bright pink Barbie suitcase. The boy held a plastic gun which he pointed around the place yelling "Bam! Hey dad, dad look! I shot a rotter, dad! Just like you did in the war!" Sasha felt faint, which was strange because she usually didn't feel anything.

Bag number 120, 50 seconds before she had to take her neurotriptyline.

Sasha couldn't focus on the people taking their bags anymore, she felt dizzy. She was going to go rabid in an airport, in a highly populated airport, in a foreign country. She had no idea how the partially deceased were treated here, she just knew how they were treated back home. Not that she could really say it felt like home anymore.

Bag number 130, 35 seconds to go.

If she ran, she could make it. She just might be able to make it somewhere private enough to take her neurotriptyline. Looking to the north, she could see her bag coming soon.

Bag number 140, 20 seconds to go.

Sasha grabbed her bag, her world becoming fuzzy, and ran to a huge display of plants in a five foot tall enclosure, of sorts, with plenty of alcoves. She sat in one of the alcoves, the back of her neck facing the huge plant pot. Her hand was shaking as she loaded the neurotriptyline in the syringe-slash-gun, 5 seconds to go.

"Let me help you with that!"

Before Sasha could speak, someone had grabbed her neurotriptyline, shoved it in the hole in her neck and injected it. They then passed the injector back to her; Sasha felt the cold metal instrument in her hands for a second. Then the sense of feeling anything at all was gone again, almost immediately.

"Sorry, for just kind of taking that from you without really asking," Sasha looked up and saw a short blonde girl. One of her eyes was blue, the other was, well, white, like a zombie's, or a partially deceased syndrome sufferer. Sasha preferred the word zombie, if she were to be frank.

"Oh, it's fine," Sasha laughed, "I shouldn't have waited until the last possible second, really."

"It's so difficult trying to do it yourself though, isn't it? And if you don't do it properly, who knows what might happen."

"Yes, thanks for the help," Sasha replied, "I might've gone rabid and eaten everyone here." Sasha laughed again.

"That would be pretty unfortunate, wouldn't it? So whose bags are those?"

"They belong to my aunt, I came to meet her, here, because she wanted to see me since I'm, well, back from the dead, and stuff."

"Oh, really I came to meet some family too, my mother, actually," the blonde girl replied.

"That's nice, I think."

"Krista," a much taller called. She unlike the blonde girl, was not wearing cover-up, or contacts. Her skin was grey, like a lot of zombies. She had long stitches going down the side of her right temple as well. Sasha wondered how she died.

"Who's this?" the taller girl asked.

"I don't know, she's one of us though."

"I'm Sasha," she replied out of nature. _Crap. _Her passport, told a different story.

"Great. Look, Krista, I found your other contact."

"Thanks," the girl, Krista (Sasha assumed), smiled, then her face fell. "Ugh, Ymir, it's dirty."

"Go to the bathroom and wash it then, or something."

"Yeah, that's a good idea. Can you keep an eye for my mum, you know what she looks like, right?"

"Yes, you only showed me the photo about a million times before we got here."

"Great. Okay, be right back," Krista turned to say goodbye to Sasha, however there was no one there. Sasha had taken off while the two were distracted because, well, she wasn't going to explain the truth to two complete strangers.

If she could breathe, the air outside the airport would be cold and fresh. Now she just had to get to the train station. It was a new one, built after the rising. Apparently a lot of train stations in Germany had been a place where zombies liked to congregate, no one really knew why. But, a lot of the military had bombed train stations in order to try and take out a lot of the zombies. Strangely enough, it was not as good a tactic as originally assumed, it just lead to a lot of crispy zombies.

There were more of the openly undead on the streets of Memmigen, it seemed to be a fashionable aesthetic in this part of the world. There was even a poster advertising a type of foundation that made people appear to look more like a PDS sufferer. _That's disgusting, _Sasha thought.

* * *

The train station was a little less diverse, there was even a piece of graffiti saying "Rotters go back to your grave!" Definitely not the most punchy piece of spray painted abuse, but it certainly got the message across.

The train to Ulm arrived faster than Sasha had expected it to, but it was probably because she had arrived later than she expected to. A few people got on the train, but not many. Sasha removed her phone. It was her old phone from before she died, four years ago.

The world seemed the same and yet it also seemed drastically different. Everyone had experienced an apocalypse, a long period of time with almost no TV or luxuries or anything good and fun. It was a time when you couldn't leave your house because you might get torn limb from limb and feverishly pecked apart by a reanimated corpse.

She flipped through her phone contacts, looking for her aunt or cousin's number. _Aunt Springer _popped up first, it was logical when the name filed began with an A.

"_On train 2 Ulm. R u meeting me ther?" _Sasha texted, her fingers were slightly stiff making texting on her tiny keypad even more awkward than it had been four years ago. Her phone beeped a few minutes later.

_ "__Were meeting you at the train station love lara," _the message read. Sasha closed her phone and put it back in her backpack. She'd be safe soon.

* * *

AN: So the first chapter is kind of world building and introducing you to Sasha's situation and then the next one is more Mikasa centric, which is going to be similar to Kieren's story from 'In the Flesh' in the season 1 arc. Anyways, thank you for reading. Also, wish me luck because the 'In the Flesh' season finale is on tonight and I know it's going to break my heart. Oh and in Lara's text message, I know it's the wrong W-E-R-E but it's supposed to be because they have older mobile phones and a lot of adults can't figure out how to add in apostrophes and commas, I remember this from 2009.


	2. At Home

Trost was a small village in Southern Germany. Trost was on a very high hill that sloped into a valley. At the foot of the hills was a village called Heilige Maria, where the High school for the region had been located, as was the same for the train station, the medical clinic, the church, the graveyard... Most of those little local amenities had been located there in the little flat piece of land.

Everything had changed during the rising. Being surrounded by hills, the brunt of the villagers were killed right then and there. The church and its graveyard was built in one of the areas which did not have a hill at the back of it but rather a continuous stretch of flat land leading into the woods. This meant there was only one direction in which one could escape, at the very opposite end of the village, where much less people lived.

The government evacuated the survivors into the second largest village at the top of the hill, Trost, which received marginally less damage as the zombies seemed to suffer with the orienteering of the terrain. A large barbed wire fence with a current running through it was built around the village of Heilige Maria. Somehow, some zombies from the village would managed to get through the fence but were often killed almost immediately.

When neurotriptyline started its German trials, the scientists attempted to start a base in the old abandoned village, which was almost completely destroyed during the evacuations and the years of neglect that followed. The scientists and doctors worked in the school, and the medical clinic.

Mikasa remembered waking up in her geography classroom only it was dark and mouldy and instead of desks there were beds and she was wearing a straitjacket and then a voice she'd never heard before said "She's responding to the drug."

Mikasa thought about that moment a lot, especially whenever she took her neurotriptyline. A lot of PDS sufferers said that they remembered things from their rabid state -killing people, seeing things, rising- when they took their neurotriptyline. Mikasa had flashbacks of the first moment of clarity in her second life, instead of the predatory mindless rabid state.

She was doing the ironing, this morning, because it helped to take her mind off of the fact that things were different now. Before she had died, she used to do all the household chores, or help with them at least. It was how she showed the Jaegar family her gratitude.

However doing chores in this house didn't really help because it wasn't the house she'd done them in before. When she ironed she couldn't feel the steam or the heat of the iron. And when she ironed Eren's clothes she always noticed the 'FVL' patch on his shirt. The 'FVL', which stood for_ Freiwillige Verteidigern des Lebendigen (_German for the "Voluntary Defenders of the Living.").

In this area the 'FVL' were heroes in their own right who still walked around with their guns attached to their belt loops and wore their army jackets over their clothes. Because of their intimidating demeanour no one told them they were out of line. They would sit in the local pub, complaining about all the liberties "rotters" had and their lack of reward for their participation in the war.

These kind of voluntary military groups had sprouted up all around the world during the rising, mostly in areas with a smaller population, which were considered less of a priority to the real army. In Southern France you could find the PVH, Protecteurs de la Vie Humaine. In the North of Britain there was the HVF, Human Volunteer Force. In small southern towns, rabid zombies found their revival cut short by the RRR, the Rabid Rotter Resistance. There were probably more, but these were the only groups Mikasa had heard of.

She'd seen a documentary about different PDS sufferers in three different countries settling back to normal life, each coming from areas where there were anti-undead groups were still around. She found it a small comfort, in knowing that whilst the 'FVL' were verbally abuse, they'd never had the guts to go round to an actual PDS sufferer's home and unload a gun into their head. A situation which had happened both in England and America.

She sighed before folding the clothes and then taking them up to the landing. After that, she went and checked the mail box. She noticed that there was a letter addressed to her and Eren from the government.

She sat down at the table and opened hers up, it read as follows.

_"__Dear Mikasa Ackerman,_

_You have been randomly selected for our re-integration scheme. You will be expected to enrol into The Central Ulm Gesamtschule. This is a new school, and building will reach completion by the end of July. On the 15__th__of August you will be expected to attend an open-day in order to get used to the school. You will also take an examination to decide whether you can take preparatory classes for college._

Mikasa stared at the letter for a few seconds. Really? They thought it was a good idea to enrol teenage zombies into a school in the centre of a city. Teenagers that were highly dangerous in an unmedicated state. _Whatever, _Mikasa thought. She wondered if Eren's letter said the same.

She knocked on Eren's door, letter in hand.

"Come in," he called. Mikasa entered and noticed her brother was sat wearing his 'FVL' jacket and playing _'Call of Duty: World at War – Zombies'_ on his _Xbox 360._

"A letter came for you, I think it's from the government," she said. Eren paused his game and took the letter from his sister.

"Any idea what it's about?"

"I had one saying that they'rr enrolling me in a Gesamtschule in Ulm as part of an intergration project."

"I hope I don't have one of those. If any thing good came from all the dead people coming back to life, it was that I didn't have to go to school," Eren said as he pulled out his letter from the envelope. Mikasa felt like she should've been more offended by that comment than she actually was. She told herself he was just joking.

"Apparently, I'm going to some sort of thing for the work I did in the 'FVL'. I wonder if Levi got the same letter?"

"Probably."

"Hey, by the way, do you know where dad is?"

"I think he went to visit the Springer's, on a house call."

* * *

AN: yeah, so the 'In the Flesh' season 2 ending ripped my heart out but it was really good as well.

Reviews:

TodayParade:  Thanks! You should definitely check out 'In the Flesh' it has a lot of socio-political commentary in it as well as well written charaters and interesting plots. Also in season 2 the main character, Kieren, starts dating another zombie called Simon and it's quite cute. Also if you Google Image search Luke Newberry, who plays Kieren, you'll find a compelling argument to watch the show.

Friend: Thank you!

chaosrin: Thanks! I have done a little more world building, but it's more an application of non-culturally affected facts from the 'In the Flesh'. The sghow is very interesting. A lot of the stuff in this isn't necessarily in the original program, such as all voluntary military groups except for the HVF. Yeah, I think I can get into the actual plot next chapter though.


End file.
